We’re Powering Digital Resistance with Help from Mozilla

As part of this end-of-year campaign, Mozilla is matching donations up to a total of $500,000 -- so your donation to the Tor Project will go twice as far!

Privacy and freedom online under attack

The number of attacks on censorship and privacy over the internet was unprecedented in 2017. Countries around the world tried to limit access to the web, stifle dissent, and erode personal privacy. In Egypt, where they literally tried to turn off the internet in 2011, the new regime blocked access to over 400 websites, including several dozen news websites. Following unrest in Venezuela, the government blocked access to several online news services. In Turkey, the government censored the internet after a disputed referendum. In the United States, Congress rolled back laws designed to strengthen consumer privacy, allowing ISPs to track users and sell their data.

Tor powered digital resistance against these attacks, enabling activists to mobilize, journalists to report, and ordinary people to access blocked websites and avoid tracking. The internet is an essential tool for free expression and access to information, and we believe these essential rights should be available to all.

We’ve been busy this year making Tor stronger and easier to use. Some of the highlights: We made critical improvements to the Tor software, making it an even stronger tool for censorship circumvention. We designed the next generation of onion services, so Tor now provides a high degree of privacy for both sharing information online and web browsing, and we redesigned and expanded our metrics portal, giving people hard data about Tor use around the world.

More challenges ahead

It looks like the challenges will continue in 2018. Many governments and corporations want to make censorship the norm and make privacy a thing of the past. There is still much work to be done to protect our most vulnerable users and keep Tor powering digital resistance.

We’re very lucky to have Mozilla as a partner. Mozilla and Tor Project engineers regularly collaborate on Tor Browser and on importing (and substantially enhancing) Tor Browser privacy patches into Firefox. All of Tor Browser’s first-party isolation patches and most of our anti-fingerprinting patches are now in Firefox, and the last few are on the way. Mozilla engineers have helped Tor developers learn the Rust programming language. Mozilla supports our research and awarded us one of its first MOSS grants to enhance the security and integrity of the Tor Project’s metrics. Mozilla also helps the Tor network by running Tor relays.

Join the digital resistance

Because of Mozilla’s generous support, there’s never been a better time to make a gift to the Tor Project.

Then make a ticket in the Tor trac bugtracker and tell them to rip that blacklist apart? (Also your assumption is baseless, just because they're against "fake news" doesn't mean they'll start blocking those sites.)

The Tor node operators colluded to prevent the DailyStormer onion service from working by throttling/blacklisting connections to them. Not ever giving money to Tor again if they think they can pick and choose who has rights and who does not.

The DS guy who said that is lying. He doesn't understand or purposefully doesn't mention how difficult it would be to have 6+ random relays (that change every day!) to collude in order to effectively block an onion service.

Even if it was true that some relays tried to block a site (which it fucking isn't, by the way), the Tor Project doesn't run any relays. You're getting mad and threatening to withhold money from the wrong people.

So you don't run any relays, but decided to speak for them anyway? Your credibility is now below zero. It became zero when you singled out DS but kept silent about the truly dark stuff that the dark web is known for.

That's not "common sense". That's the belief among liberals. Conservatives believe that CNN and MSNBC are fake news. I myself believe it's all a load of crap, and each site is distorting facts in whatever way gets them the most money. Liberal or conservative is no exception.

Those who have been reading this blog for several years know that there has been a push from the user base to try to move Tor Project away from a funding model which depends primarily upon grants from USG tied entities, such as NED (National Endowment for Democracy) or SRI (Stanford Research Institute), which have in the past been major sponsors of Tor Project, and toward a funding model which depends primarily upon user donations. The current CEO of Tor Project was brought in precisely to work towards this goal.

IMO it would be going to far to say that TP was ever funded by the US MIC itself, but I and many other loyal users long felt that it was unseemly and ultimately dangerous to allow TP to depend too heavily upon USG-tied entities, even ones such as NED and RFA (Radio Free Asia) which might appear to many Americans as fairly benign. The problem was not so much funding tied to the U.S. military as funding tied to some of the less odious portions of the U.S. State Department. Apparently without explicit strings ever being attached, but still...

If you value Tor as much as I do, I hope you will join me and other ordinary users in contributing. This is the surest way to ensure the continued existence of Tor and also the best way to lessen the chance that Tor Project might somehow be subjected to undue influence (or worse) from the USG.

I just wanted to say thank you to the developers and everyone at the Tor Project. I use Tor on my main computers and mobile every day to keep my ISP's from selling my browsing history (and to keep the NSA at bay). It's given me an enormous peace of mind knowing I can do something to stop the further erosion of my privacy. Thank you thank you thank you! I donated a few months ago and again just recently when I saw Mozilla was matching donations. Thank you all for your hard work.

Important question: Do the "Dollars raised" numbers that are shown in https://donate.torproject.org/pdr include the extra amount that Mozilla gives or is it only donations without taking into account Mozilla's help? Thanks!

They react before the law becomes active !
They shut down vpn & tor , like it is advised take a good vpn + tor (bridge if necessary).
The worst is all these malfunctions i noticed on the plugin : https & noscript ; i do not know if it is a bug , a general attack , a mass survey or a personal target ... and it can be also a bad joke related to Tor blog_Team (spoofing ? mitm ?).
good luck to Russian people.

Recent Updates

Hi! There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.3.3.2-alpha from the usual place on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release some time in February.

Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.

Tor 0.3.3.2-alpha is the second alpha in the 0.3.3.x series. It introduces a mechanism to handle the high loads that many relay operators have been reporting recently. It also fixes several bugs in older releases. If this new code proves reliable, we plan to backport it to older supported release series.

Changes in version 0.3.3.2-alpha - 2018-02-10

Major features (denial-of-service mitigation):

Give relays some defenses against the recent network overload. We start with three defenses (default parameters in parentheses). First: if a single client address makes too many concurrent connections (>100), hang up on further connections. Second: if a single client address makes circuits too quickly (more than 3 per second, with an allowed burst of 90) while also having too many connections open (3), refuse new create cells for the next while (1-2 hours). Third: if a client asks to establish a rendezvous point to you directly, ignore the request. These defenses can be manually controlled by new torrc options, but relays will also take guidance from consensus parameters, so there's no need to configure anything manually. Implements ticket 24902.

Major bugfixes (netflow padding):

Stop adding unneeded channel padding right after we finish flushing to a connection that has been trying to flush for many seconds. Instead, treat all partial or complete flushes as activity on the channel, which will defer the time until we need to add padding. This fix should resolve confusing and scary log messages like "Channel padding timeout scheduled 221453ms in the past." Fixes bug 22212; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.